Industry
News
Abu Dhabi developers delay projects in
response to the property downtown.
According to Sujit Parhar, the company’s
chief executive at the time, Tabreed plans
to complete 16 plants this year, but expansion plans for next year and later are being
scaled back. “Nothing is cancelled, but we
are changing the schedule of plants that
haven’t been built after discussions with
developers,” he said.
This article can be read in its entirety
at http://tinyurl.com/y8rkfvq.
Desalination Advocate:
District Cooling Systems
Must Recycle Wastewater
District cooling companies must find
alternatives to desalinated water, and their
only option is to recycle wastewater,
according to Fady Juez, managing director,
Metito, and chairman of the International
Desalination Association organizing committee. Juez made the comment during an
interview published Aug. 19 in “Emirates
Business 24/7” online newsletter.
Juez was asked whether he had seen
an increase in compliance by district cooling
companies to ban the use of desalinated
water, which they have already been warned
to do by authorities such as DEWA (Dubai
Electricity and Water Authority). He replied,
“I think they have no option. They cannot
continue taking water from the sea, purify
it and use it for cooling towers. You cannot
continue to do that. They have to find
alternatives to desalinated water. The only
option they have is wastewater recycling.
This can be done. We can make water
exactly the same quality as bottled water
from a wastewater.” [sic]
Juez said that producing drinking water
from wastewater is 20 percent to 30 percent
cheaper than producing from seawater. He
said he believes the UAE has taken a first
big step toward conserving the environment by treating liquid waste from humans
and industry. The second step is to recycle
the water, and the UAE is doing just that
by recycling it into irrigation. The next step,
he pointed out, is moving into the next
phase, which is using wastewater for district
cooling.
In the United Arab Emirates, much of
the ground water is not only too high in
nitrates, it is also too saline to meet drinking
water standards – which is why desalinated
seawater is the main source of drinking water,
supplying 95 percent of total requirements.
The entire interview with Juez may be
read at http://tinyurl.com/ye3hj46.
Quick Start Feature
for York Chillers
Johnson Controls has introduced the
Quick Start feature for its York® centrifugal
chillers equipped with OptiSpeed™ variable-speed drives. Designed to reduce time
for chiller restart after power failure – by as
much as 75 percent – the feature rapidly
re-establishes chilled-water temperature,
keeps process equipment cooled and
reduces the risk of expensive downtime.
Quickly restarting a chiller can avoid the
catastrophic consequences of data loss,
equipment damage from overheating and
operational downtime. In addition to minimizing chiller restart time, the Quick Start
feature also reduces the time required to
return to the specified leaving chilled-water
temperature (LCHWT). Re-establishing LCHWT
is a function of load, compressor size and
specified temperatures. For a 500-ton
chiller at low load without the Quick Start
feature enabled, a chiller can re-establish
LCHWT in about 10 minutes, while a chiller
with the Quick Start feature takes approximately three minutes – 70 percent faster.
Available as an option for 250- to
3,000-ton York centrifugal chillers, the
Quick Start feature requires a York OptiSpeed
drive. The variable-speed drive, with its
patented adaptive capacity control, remembers optimum speeds for various operating
conditions, reducing annual chiller energy
consumption and lowering carbon dioxide
emissions by as much as 30 percent.
K-State Uses Stimulus
for Steam Pipes
Kansas State University in Manhattan,
Kan., has been awarded $2.3 million in
federal stimulus funds for 2009, which it
plans to invest in long-deferred infrastructure projects. The K-State News Insider
reported Sept. 23 that the first project to
be undertaken with the funds will be
replacement of the 80-year-old pipes that
supply the campus with steam for space
heating in winter and hot water throughout the year.
K-State officials would like to get the
work done before the pipes deteriorate to
the point that the education mission of the
university is affected. The project is one
from a long list of maintenance work
deferred over the years because of inadequate state funding of Kansas Board of
Regents' institutions. The project could
start as early as spring 2010.
“Interruption in the flow of steam to
facilities located in the southwest corner of
our campus could stop scheduled teaching,
research and other educational programs
planned for those buildings,” said Abe
Fattaey, K-State's director of facilities planning and university architect.
The project consists of replacing long
lengths of pipe that stretch from roughly
the Power Plant down to the K-State
Student Union and Memorial Stadium.
Buildings served by this project include
Durland, Fiedler, Rathbone and Seaton
Halls; Ahearn Field House and the
Natatorium; the K-State Student Union;
and the offices and classrooms in East and
West Stadium.
K-State is scheduled to receive an
additional $5.6 million in stimulus funds to
work on more critical infrastructure projects
in 2010.
Cooling With
Snow in Sweden
According to the Advantage Environment Web site, one Swedish company is
taking a novel approach to meeting the
growing demand for district cooling – by
utilizing snow, found in abundance in
northern Sweden. In an article published in
September on the site, Snowpower AB is
using a 60,000-cu-m ( 2. 1 million-cu-ft) pile
of stored winter snow to cool the Sundsvall
Hospital in summer.
During a normal winter, Stockholm’s
street clearing crews dump about a million
cu m ( 35. 3 million cu ft) of snow in the
